Investigation of surface orientation dependent sputtering of Ag

Sputtering of metal surfaces can be both a beneficial phenomenon, for instance in the coating industry, or an undesired side-effect, for instant materials subjected to irradiation. While the average sputtering yields are well known in common metals, recent studies have shown that the yields can depend on the crystallographic orientation of the surface much stronger than commonly appreciated. In this study, we investigate by computational means, molecular dynamics, the sputtering of single crystalline Ag surfaces under various incoming energies. The results at low and high energy are compared to experimental results for single crystalline Ag nanocubes of different orientations. We observe strong differences between the sputtering yields of different surface directions and ion energies. We analyze the results in terms of the atom cluster size of the sputtered materials, and show that the cluster size distribution is a key factor to understand the correspondence between simulations and experiments. At low energies mainly single atoms are sputtered, whereas at higher energies the sputtered material is mainly in atom clusters.